FLORENCE, Italy — It’s early October 2023, and an unusual event is taking place in the Salone dei Cinquecento, a soaring, Medici-commissioned space in Florence’s 15th-century Palazzo Vecchio, still an operating city hall. Its walls and 18-meter-high ceilings (nearly 60 feet) are lushly adorned with framed frescoes by Giorgio Vasari depicting battles and conquests; lusty sculptures stand on plinths around the perimeter. On a screen the size of one of the frescoes, a film begins rolling. In it is a young man outside an Italian bar/cafe. He moves, claps, calls, and whistles like the birds around him; it’s immediately clear that he’s neurodiverse. As the two-minute film loops, one by one young performers enter the Salone and take their places in front of the screen, mimicking the man. His name is Alessio, a 26-year-old Roman on the autism spectrum. “Alessio” is also the title of this film/installation/performance piece by Italian artist Nico Vascellari.
The sequence repeats for almost 40 minutes; by then, 40-odd dancers are moving in unison, each interpreting Alessio’s movements and sounds (over and over, he sways, slaps his bare belly and forehead, pulls on a twig and throws leaves on the ground, and more). At first the looping feels repetitive, even boring, but then it becomes hypnotic, as if we, in the seated audience, can now somehow read Alessio’s nonverbal communication. Near the end of the performance, the sound cuts, but the dancers continue to call and slap in unison with the silent moving images. Then the screen goes blank, and the dancers continue briefly as a group before coming to a halt.
The performance was uncanny, odd, powerful. And now, there’s a second chance to experience it: a video installation titled “OLTRE,” based on footage from the October performance, is currently on view in the Hall of Arms at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
I’d met Vascellari the night before the October 3 performance, and knew that his previous work was largely based on sound (he has fronted several underground or punk bands, like With Love and now Ninos du Brasil) or performances in which the artist himself is the main protagonist. He also works in sculpture, often alluding to dark mythological and occult symbolism like the ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail to represent death and rebirth. In addition, he’s the man behind the popular T-shirts in Italy that show anagrams of words, like DREAM/MERDA or AMOR/ROMA, produced from his studio/shop Codalunga, and he’s directed fashion shows for Fendi. “Alessio” was part of the city of Florence’s six-month spotlight on Vascellari’s oeuvre, which included a solo exhibition, MELMA, on view in the Forte di Belvedere, a fortress in the hills above the city. (The aluminum sculptures in the show, installed outdoor on fortress ramparts with views over Florence, are mashups of large animals with automotive engines.)
Much of Vascellari’s work explores the deeper relationships and connections between humanity and nature (the night before, he’d shown me stunning smartphone pictures of gorillas in the wild, which he’d visited, come close to, and wordlessly communicated with). Here, he dives into human expression in all its forms. What does it mean to present neurodiversity in an art-world context? Where is the line between exploitation and inclusion? How did this piece come to pass? Vascellari explained that at exactly the same time every day, from his studio in Rome, he’d heard an odd calling sound. He went to investigate and encountered its source, Alessio, at the younger man’s regular bar, visits to which are part of his daily routine. The artist befriended Alessio, and met his mother and a psychologist; the idea to create a work based on Alessio’s world took root. (The ethics of this work have always been delicate: both mother and psychologist granted permission to film, as Alessio is nonverbal. Filming took place openly.)
“The piece is about love,” Vascellari told me, before I’d seen it. Early in it I felt uncomfortably voyeuristic, but I soon recognized the work’s lack of judgment. “Alessio” is profoundly personal, almost tender — a contrast to the Salone, a historical space dedicated to images of war (in a time in which even more real wars are waging). It’s about connecting to and honoring an idiosyncratic behavioral syntax by somatically sharing it: others, the performers, can now perceive and be part of Alessio’s inner world because they, too, have moved his movements. The young man’s sways, sounds, and slaps are stimming and self-soothing, but it’s surprising how soothing they are to observe as a viewer, at least to me. Normative society has othered behavior like Alessio’s, but we all viscerally know it, somehow (vestibular activities like swaying regulate sensory input and calm the nervous system). We are confronted with our own humanity through this piece, which unapologetically shows alternate ways of being human.
Art made by people on the autism spectrum has become increasingly celebrated within art-world establishments — for instance, the collective Project Art Works, founded in 1996 in the UK and intended to support neurodiverse artists with materials and studio space and add visibility to their high-quality artworks, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. Yet neurodiversity as a subject in art is rare, as is the visibility of an openly neurodiverse person in an art-world context. It’s an intriguing blind spot, as a good number of well-known contemporary artists are on the spectrum, which is seldom discussed or acknowledged. It’s notable, too, that researchers assume that Michelangelo, who was also commissioned to provide a work for the Salone — sketches exist of a fresco that never came to pass — was likely autistic. It was well documented that the native Tuscan lived by rigid routines, and had difficulty with emotional regulation and in social situations.
In researching more of Vascellari’s work, I discovered that “Alessio” echoes some of the artist’s own performances. In “Doou,” a 24-hour performance streamed on the last day of Italy’s national lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist moves through his studio space with a microphone and endlessly repeats a guitar riff and sings the lyrics “I trusted you” (the piece is a cover of a short 1977 song/performance by comedian Andy Kaufman). His moves and obvious fatigue are both boring and fascinating; but the mantra-like repetition starts to tickle, scratch, and ultimately bore into something forgotten, ritualistic, and primal in the viewer (at one point, 2,000 people were watching online). We’re all primal, he seems to say, in both of these works, like everything in nature. And like all of nature, we’re all valuable and worth paying attention to.
Oltre continues at Salone dei Cinquecento’s Sala d’Arme (Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy) through January 7. In the coming months “Alessio” will also be presented at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, and at MSU in Zagreb, Croatia.
Editor’s Note, 12/4/2023: Some travel for the author was paid for by Sam Talbot PR.